


Falling Is The First Step To Flying

by StarHost



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Existentialism, Gen, Humanstuck, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:38:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarHost/pseuds/StarHost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Tavros Nitram, and you are too crippled to even kill yourself right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Falling Is The First Step To Flying

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what i'm doing

Your name is Tavros Nitram and if you could stand you would be five foot eight. 

But you can’t; your legs are thin and mangled and you can’t remember what walking feels like over the searing memory of jagged rock against your back. 

You lost your legs exactly two thousand nine-hundred days ago, and you count each day with a small, neat number in red ink at the corner of your calendar. It would make logical sense to say you do this because you hold a grudge against the person who pushed you (smile twisted as you fell backward, her wild hair tangled like vines of ivy), but you don’t, and you set each day in digits to remind yourself how long you’ve been living dead.

Your name is Tavros Nitram and when you visit Gamzee Makara you always take the path that goes over the highway. This is where - on a narrow sidewalk squeezed between the onslaught of traffic - you found your fixation, the voice inside your skull that could be your confidence personified if it wasn’t so twisted and dripping with malice. You first found it the day your wheels slipped on a patch of muddy run-off and you were sent backwards, hands flailing and grating against cement and when you hit a wall and stopped yourself you looked up for the first time in weeks. And when you looked up you should have seen the sky, but instead the sun was in your eyes and the only thing you could make out was the cement and iron of the barrier. 

And the voice.

The voice was there.

The barrier.

Your name is Tavros Nitram and the voice is very convincing. You wheel past the barrier on every trip to Gamzee’s, and every glance at the cement adds to your stirring temptation. You know that on the other side of the wall lies nothing but a short drop to the underpass. You also know that between the underpass and the edge of the rail lies air.

(You know the air exists because you can breathe it. And you know you can breathe it because you are alive. This, you’ve keened to yourself in the small hours of the morning, eyes shut tight, mind ablaze, needs to change.)

On the day you fell, you knew that everything was against you. Bent backwards over the jutting edges of boulders your eyes were sky bound, open to the flurry that was Earth in slow motion. You looked up into the light, and you realized you weren’t dead. You breathed. But everything was different. 

There was a sea of sky, or a sky of sea - you can’t remember which against the crash of wind on waves - that swirled and spiraled and perched above on a pedestal of hydrogen and motioned to you, ‘ _fly, peter, fly_ ’, and that wasn’t your name but you couldn’t move your arms because your wings were long gone. Though you tried to move them, to sit up and stand and flap the feathers you’ve always wished you had, you couldn’t, and the wind blew and suddenly the sky was dark and twisted and it smiled at you through bared sparks of lightning. And it laughed, rumbled across the land and it never wanted you anyways.

Nothing ever wanted you. As you lay, you looked into the core of every tree, every drop of sea spray, every grain of dirt on the cliffside. Even the stones that had caught your fall in a sickening crunch of splatter and bones, even they laughed. 

You want to believe this is the moment you became obsolete. But you know better.  You’d been frozen in place long before your legs stopped moving.

Your name is Tavros Nitram, and though the barrier is made of concrete and metal, it’s the closest thing to nature in your life. To you it looks proud, organic in shape and if you close your eyes and place your hand on its side you are fifty feet up and the grass whispers beneath your feet. If you imagine hard enough, then you can stand - yes, stand - on the edge where the top flattens out and below you is a sea of boulders, their ragged hands waving up at you and beyond them is a real sea, greeny-blue and it’s beautiful.

But if there’s anything you’ve learnt it’s that beautiful things are dangerous, and if it wasn’t your own imagination the waves would bare their teeth and sneer at you and the roots beneath your toes would push you over the edge.

You think that, maybe, this would be a good thing.

 

Your name is Tavros Nitram and the world attempted to kill you two thousand nine-hundred days ago. 

You look at the barrier.

Sometimes you wish you could just hoist yourself over and finish the job, after all half of you is already dead, gone to the depths of _if it can’t feel then it can’t be alive_. It's not like mother nature to give you slack, so you figure that day was one of her slip ups. A sloppy job done, and the consequences show. 

Sometimes you picture yourself standing on the barrier, arms held sideways and you sway before you fall, the wind in your face. Sometimes the urge to throw yourself over is so strong that you stop and force your shoes off beside the cement. But you bite your tongue every time, because it's ironic how the only thing stopping you is the height difference between the top of the rail and your wheelchair. If you could stand, you could climb over. 

You are too crippled to even kill yourself right.

You _are_ Tavros Nitram, and your life is one big mistake after another. When you were young, when all you had was half a parent and a rusty box of make believe to your name, you used to think that everything would be alright. Back when you could feel worthy with only sheets and pillows, as you scurried around creaky floors, you thought you were going to be a hero. You thought you were going to be Peter Pan. You thought you were going to fly. 

And now look at you.

Gamzee says something and you laugh, because you only half-heard what he was saying and you think maybe it wasn’t funny, but laughing is a validation that’s as good as any other. His strides are long and he sways a little when he walks, but with your wheels it’s not much effort to keep up. You are both out for a stroll around his neighbourhood, and it’s starting to get cold so you’ve donned your winter jacket and Gamzee has his ratty trench coat and scarf. 

If you squint you can just barely see your breath, that sort of puffy-wispy that comes with atom bombs and mushroom clouds. Every so often Gamzee’s hand brushes against the side of your chair, and you can see it out of the corner of your eye, bony and pale and impossibly tendoned. 

When he’s high he often says that you’re different, not like the others, and though you probably aren’t thinking in the same way you sort of agree. You aren’t like the rest of those you associate with, you’re too nice, you’re too soft and too forgiving and you would never make a good leader.

You have things in common, of course you do and you wouldn’t have known them if you didn’t. But maybe it’s the way everyone else talks - maybe it’s the fact that they talk and you always seem to sit in the corner and pick at peeling paint. Do you even have vocal cords anymore? The answer is yes, but some days you don’t know.

Because you are so quiet, so stuck to the wall like gaudy paper that sweats out in the summertime, there are things they haven’t seen. You used to like to smile because it was polite and it was who you were, and you still are, sort of, but beneath that there was  a loathing that no one thought you had. There was a pool of ink at the bottom of everything inside you, eating at your walls of dirt and no matter how violently it moved its surface was always razor sharp, waveless. It gleamed up at you with daggers for teeth and in the sleek surface you always saw yourself.

This is both your difference and similarity, because - though self-deprecation seems to be a common trend - unlike the clear cut loathing known from both Sollux and Karkat, you hate yourself quietly.

Your name is spelt with six letters, and you are a Taurus by sign, and you’ve reached that spot on the overpass, your spot, and you stop. There’s a bit of a breeze that weaves through your hair, rustling the frayed end of Gamzee’s scarf. It takes him half a second to stop with you, but when he does he looks at the back of your skull and doesn’t say a word. 

Your head starts to cloud up, and soon the traffic is miles away and there is a bubble around your senses. You can see the light spilling over the top of the barrier and Gamzee leans over your chair and you don’t move. His voice grates by your ears but you can’t hear what he’s saying, the wind whispering at you and suddenly you are halfway to the edge and his impossibly spindly arms are forcibly holding you back.

You claw at the cement with your nails and bite your tongue so hard it bleeds and you wish you were strong enough to be able to hold the dead weight in your bottom half. But you aren’t, so you slide back down like you always do, fingers raw and rough and the blood in your mouth a mockery of what you could have had if you could _just reach the top._

Gamzee’s tone has lost its calm and if you’d bothered to look over you would have seen the crease of his eyebrows as he stares at you, hands still around your waist, your borderline - you can only half feel him, you can only half feel, you _can -_

  


And you are the light spilling over the barrier as you are freed.

You can’t remember what you’re screaming but your throat is raw, a tug at your hips but you’re so far past that now, you can see the greyed graffiti on the other side and the sun bursts over it just right, waves of sea of sky and you’ve waited so long to fly, so long to spread your wings it’s not too late it’s never too late-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  


 

You are Tavros Nitram, two thousand nine-hundred days different, and you wake up on a creaky bed with the realization that you haven’t died. Your head is pounding against itself in time with your heart, painfully exaggerated with the weight of a freight train. You would like to be able to say you don’t remember anything, but it’s painful in evidence and for once you can’t lie. You remember, and boy, do you feel stupid.

You think that this must be some twisted version of what people call ‘survivor’s guilt’, maybe, if you were sure of what the term meant. You aren’t though, you never read enough when you were young and the ceiling is judging you from its heightened perch. You could glare if your eyes weren’t so sore, and the more you stare the more the crumbled white shifts to a fast approaching grey, hard and resounding as concrete cradles your skull in welcome. 

The light swirling in from outside is decidedly too bright; you try to move your hand over your eyes as a shield, and find you can’t. Your body is lazily pinned with an arm and a leg and you glance to your left to see Gamzee curled next to you, limbs resting on your segments, relaxed and delicate and somehow reassuring. His breath is slow next to your temple, and he’s casually wrapped around you like he’s hugging a stuffed doll.

But isn’t that all you are? All you ever were? Just stuffed from the inside out, with falsities and faults and fractures for flaws. Gamzee’s arm is dead weight on your stomach, you’ve never realized how heavy he was when lifeless, and your eyes become sharp against the shine on the walls and _wait just a moment_.

It occurs to you that, though you did not die, you’d struck the wall head first, welcomed an after-conscious-void with a surge of dark, not light. You didn’t die - you didn’t even fall - but you did go limp, and you did stop breathing and wasn’t that almost same thing? You’d been the closest to death you’d ever come, opaque and fully numb from your toes to your ears and in that moment, you realize, Gamzee saw you. 

And he picked you up.

And he carried you home.

You don’t have the chance to wonder half the things that are waiting in line, because suddenly your throat is far too tight and you can barely breathe, your eyes stinging with warm wet and you don’t remember what your legs feel like but it’s been two thousand nine-hundred days since you really, truly cried.

And Gamzee stirs a little, but he’s always been a heavy sleeper so you’re pretty sure he doesn’t wake, and you’re too busy sobbing your heart out to care, ribs heaving as you shudder. You cry for a while - you aren’t sure for how long but you cry until the sun goes down, painting the walls red before it sinks into inky nothingness. And you know you should feel alone, you do, but every so often you think, maybe, Gamzee’s arms tighten around you - though it could be your imagination - and every so often your arm twines around his, all awkward angles and ugly edges and your insides don’t feel as empty as they’re supposed to. 

Your diaphragm heaves, and for once, you don’t mind.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments would be pretty cool, but w/e.
> 
> This is only semi-beta'd, so please feel free to point out spelling mistakes if you stumble across them!
> 
> Thank you Stace for helping me along this entire process.


End file.
